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Kingsbury School Scores Full Marks for Sustainability with New Building from Smart Space

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Needing space to accommodate new sixth form places Kingsbury School in rural north Warwickshire, sought a more sustainable answer than hiring prefabricated portable classrooms. Following a tendering process based around the low environmental impact requirements in part L of the Building Regulations, they opted for a fully insulated, heated, permanent structure from light-weight buildings specialists Smart Space. This is fully compliant with simplified building energy model (SBEM) calculations.

To meet the school’s operational needs the new building, comprising three classrooms, was designed from first principles and delivered within a school year. On-site construction took just 15 weeks, minimising disruption to the school. Based on a light-weight steel frame, with insulated wall and roof panels, the building required far less groundwork than conventional construction. The whole project, including two technology classrooms, was completed for £200,000 and funded from within the school’s own budget.

Headmaster Simon Cotton noted, “Sustainability is a key element of this project so we sought tenders on this basis. Smart Space came back with a competitive proposal that balanced the use of innovative technology with more conventional approaches to give us a functional and highly efficient building within budget.”

To meet the sustainability target special features include: a secondary internal lining with 40mm insulated foam board, an insulated floor slab, underfloor heating and primary heating from an air-source heat pump. A high efficiency boiler provides domestic hot water and lighting is by energy efficient LED’s.

Smart Space, as the main contractor, undertook the building design and engineering of the primary structure. Working with consultants ARV Design they optimised insulation and building services to achieve environmental targets cost effectively. Ross Vinter of ARV explained, “Our aim was to achieve target carbon emissions as outlined in the SBEM calculations. The initial design, based on high levels of insulation and conventional technology such as electric space heating, gave emissions far exceeding the target. Therefore, we looked for alternative, but cost effective, technologies to achieve our goal. The use of an air source heat pump and underfloor heating contributed greatly to this. We considered the use of solar collectors for water heating and found they would have contributed a little more, but not sufficiently to be cost effective.”

“We will start the new school year with 35 new sixth form students and three new classrooms dedicated to food technology, textiles and psychology. This will ease up space in the school and help us toward our eventual aim of 150 post 16 students. The new building is the second on this site from Smart Space, following a sports hall that they provided two years ago. Site works were, as previously, well-coordinated and the whole package came together quickly and as promised. We also have a new building that is itself a practical demonstration for our students of the application of technology to achieve sustainability,” Simon Cotton concluded.

More Information

Antony Hunt, Managing Director, Tel. +44 (0)1827 330000 Fax. +44 (0)1827 898600
E-mail: md@smart-space.co.uk Web: www.smart-space.co.uk
SMART SPACE, Kingsbury Link, Trinity Road, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B78 2EX, UK

Press release issued: August 29, 2014

Technical Note

Heat pumps are a means of extracting heat energy from the environment for use in space heating. Using the same principles as a domestic refrigerator, the heat transfer capacity of the refrigerant fluid is increased by using the phase change between liquid and gas to depress the temperature of the transfer fluid, enabling the fluid to collect heat from the outside air, even at low temperatures. The heated refrigerant gas is then compressed, concentrating the heat energy, before this passes through a second heat exchanger that transfers the warmth into the water circulating in pipes below the school floor. Air, ground or water may be used as the environmental heat source, but air source heat pumps have lower cost and are easier to install.

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